t the highest prices known to the _bon vivant_ of a world-wide
experience. For many years after Dickens' death in 1870, indeed, until
quite recent years, with only occasional lapses, the "Ministers of the
Crown" were wont to dine at Greenwich, as a fitting _Gargantuan_ orgy to
the labours of a brain-racking session.

As one who knows his London has said, you can get a much better fish
dinner, as varied and much more attractive, in the neighbourhood of
Billingsgate, for the modest sum of two shillings.

No mention of London riverside attractions can be made without enlarging
somewhat upon the sordid and unsavoury (in more senses than one) Limehouse
Hole and Limehouse Reach.

Redolent of much that is of the under world, these localities, with indeed
those of all the waterside round about, have something of the fascination
and glamour which surrounds a foreign clime itself. Here in "Brig Place,"
evidently an imaginary neighbourhood, Dickens placed the genial
hook-armed Cuttle, and he must not only have studied these types upon the
spot, but must have been enamoured of the salty sentiment which pervades
the whole region from the notorious Ratcliffe Highway on the north, now
known by the more respectable name of St. George's Street, made famous in
the "Uncommercial Traveller," to the "Stairs" near Marshalsea on the
south, where Dickens used to stroll of a morning before he was allowed to
visit his father in the prison, and imagine those "astonishing fictions
about the wharves and the Tower."

It was at Limehouse, too, that Dickens' godfather, Huffam, a rigger and
sailmaker, lived, and with whom Dickens was so fond, when a boy, of making
excursions roundabout the "Hole" and the "Reach" with their "foul and
furtive boats."

Returning westward one finds, adjoining Somerset House, the famed Waterloo
Bridge, great as to its utility and convenience, and splendid as to its
appointments. "An exquisite combination of all that is most valuable in
bridge architecture," wrote Knight in 1842; called also by Canova, whom of
late it is become the custom to decry, the finest bridge in Europe, and
worth coming from Rome to see. It is the masterwork of one John Rennie, a
Scotch schoolmaster, and was completed in 1817, and named after the
decisive event achieved by His Majesty's forces two years before. It has
ever been the one short cut into South London from all the west central
region, and is the continuation of the roadway across the